A guy at the Ford Foundation and presumably others there think that they can ensure that the cash which the Foundation splurges on the Chinese Communist Party is being spent in only the right way.
Robert Schmad reports that the mega-charity “has spent the last four years shoveling millions of dollars into branches of the Chinese government with the stated goal of helping China carry out its strategy of funding foreign influence projects to accumulate influence” (“Ford Foundation paid CCP allies millions to aid China’s global influence operation,” Washington Examiner, December 3, 2024).
Schmad cites a 2024 report by the Government Accountability Office according to China has spent hundreds of billions “in 165 countries between 2013 and 2021 as part of its global infrastructure initiative.” The expenditures have “provided China with the ability to leverage debt against developing countries to extract political concessions and given the Chinese Communist Party a massive global telecommunications foothold.”
“Telecommunications foothold” means “propaganda foothold.”
Schmad writes:
Despite the political nature of China’s foreign infrastructure investment program, the Ford Foundation has paid out nearly $10 million since 2020 to arms of the Chinese government to assist the CCP in carrying it out, according to a Washington Examiner analysis of grant records….
Winning the lion’s share of the Ford Foundation’s grant funding were state-run universities that have a history of collaboration with China’s People’s Liberation Army.
Peking University, for instance, has received roughly $5 million since 2020 from the Ford Foundation for a variety of projects related to China’s global investments. About $1.3 million of Peking University’s Ford Foundation grants went toward funding the university’s development and maintenance of a database recording “China’s engagement with Africa.” Hundreds of thousands of dollars more flowed from the Ford Foundation to Peking University to fund research to support China’s development goals abroad, according to grant records.
Peking University has deep ties to the CCP and Chinese military, hosting a multitude of defense labs and assisting the Chinese navy in research, training, construction, and exerting cultural soft power…
Tsinghua and Zhejiang universities also received funds totaling $650,000 to conduct research in support of Chinese foreign investment. Zhejiang University hosts three major laboratories that conduct defense research and work with the PLA on classified projects. Meanwhile, Tsinghua University operates eight laboratories that produce research to bolster China’s military and offers a joint computer science program with the PLA’s Academy of Military Science. Computers at the university were linked to a 2018 espionage campaign against the Alaskan government.
Wouldn’t these kinds of details come up in the process of determining whether to confer the grants?
Working to help insure
Ford Foundation folk profess to exercise due diligence. According to a spokesman, the Foundation “works to help insure that China’s impacts in the world are equitable.” He adds that the grants serve this goal by “supporting research and knowledge sharing that promote equitable and sustainable investment and development finance practices.”
Which is an instance of lying or of ignorance so profound that it becomes its own kind of lying.
One has to assume that the directors and spokesmen of western charitable foundations are not raised, educated, onboarded, trained, and managed from day to day in so restrictive and manipulative a way that they can never hear anything about what the People’s Republic of China and similar outfits have been up to over the last century or last week. The people at the Ford Foundation must know something about the world, nyet?
Look. If you’re running a zillion-dollar foundation, you can’t be throwing money at totalitarian dictatorships and assuming that as long as the apparatchiks who fill out your application form checkmark the right boxes, you as the fund-dispensing enabler now have consummate control over where the dough goes and can only be proud of your involvement. Not even if you spout all the right gibberish. Not even if you toss in words like “equitable” and “sustainable.”
